Video is the new voice. It is changing the way we collaborate and communicate. Cisco and CA have been working together to help you on your journey to embrace video. Cisco and CA have been partnering to bring innovation to support emerging video requirements, ensure video quality and lower total cost of ownership.

We have demos and theatre presentations. If you plan to attend CA World ’11 in Las Vegas next week, come visit Cisco booth to chat with Cisco technology experts on your video & network implementation and see the Enterprise Medianet demo:

Traditionally, management software has had to approach the network as a collection of individual devices. This individual device view leads to management software that presents reports and data along device or interface lines. The applications network traversal experience is lost. While the management software could technically perform the correlation, only very few do due to the complexity required. The medianet mediatrace feature allows the operator and the management software to communicate with a set of network nodes represented by a flow. The data is consolidated and organized into a single report by the network and presented to the requestor. This allows the management system to query a set of nodes that it has not discovered, is managing or have direct contact with. Due to the built in correlation of the report mediatrace makes it trivial for the management system to do path analysis and flow analysis.

User satisfaction is the ultimate metric for performance evaluation of rich media services. The only way to be sure of delivering highest quality of experience is by actually measuring quality of experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that most IT managers identify application performance as their single most critical problem.

Many traditional performance monitoring solutions are delivered as appliances. Although an increasing number of solutions are deployed on virtual machines or in some cases cloud offerings are available, there are nevertheless ongoing administrative overhead. Monitoring is best done pervasively unless you already know in advance where all the problems are going to be. Deploying these traditional monitoring solutions typically only provide partial view as it is not possible to deploy probes everywhere.

With IOS Performance Monitor, first made available in IOS 15.1(3)T, we introduced a new innovative approach to performance monitoring. A Cisco network element is embedded with native monitoring capabilities. It can collect packet loss, jitter, delay and response time information for performance evaluation of data, voice and video services. This approach effectively turns every network element as probe providing the most extensive visibility because all the flows must go through the network. This approach eliminates the need for deploying flow data collection solutions external to the network devices which would lead to increased costs for data collection and operation expense. Now, network managers can continue to leverage their Cisco IP network assets, resulting in substantial savings.

The announcement earlier this week focused on the Borderless Networks services with new capabilities for Centralized Policy, Unified Management and Automated Video and Voice. For more information on the announcement, see Marie Hattar’s blog.

Automated Video and Voice highlights the unique capabilities in the network infrastructure to simplify the deployment and optimize the network for video.

Why video?

Because it is not a question of IF it is coming to Enterprise networks, but WHEN. As you can see from the chart from Forrester Research (Jan. 2011) the adoption for video applications and technologies is on the significant growth path because they are adding value for businesses.

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